Logo des 49. Historikertags 2012 Ressourcen und Konflikte

49. Deutscher Historikertag 2012: Ressourcen - Konflikte

Regulating Families and Resources in American Contemporary History

Zeit: 28.09.2012, 15:15 - 18:00
Ort: P 104
Kategorie: Neuere/Neueste Geschichte

Sektionsleiter/in: Jürgen Martschukat

Abstract:
Resources of a culture and society are never unlimited or divided equally among individual members. For several decades, social and cultural historians have examined the varying access to resources in the US, such as education, jobs, housing and many more. How and to what extent different individuals actively participate in society, its resource allocation, and shaping is closely related to the society's categorial mapping and the constantly reiterated differences along categories such as race, class, and gender. In recent years, this analytical framework has been significantly broadened by taking other categories into consideration, such as age, religion, sexuality, geographical region and many more. That has created a multi-dimensional and historically variable “intersectional” space. The access different individuals have to the resources, and thus their opportunities to administer their own lives, largely depends on their positioning (both culturally imposed and self-imposed) in this multi-dimensional space.

Our panel on “Regulating Families and Resources in American Contemporary History” will follow these analytical trajectories and address various issues and guiding questions raised by the cfp of the VHD. In particular, the panel will focus on three major points:

First, we will seek to grasp the significance of the family, its structure and normativity, as a crucial hinge for the regulation of the access to resources provided to different individuals and groups. Second, the papers will be arranged around a most significant resource conflict in recent U.S.-history, which is the protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s, when many people fought to change their cultural, social, economic and political positions within American society and to gain greater access to its resources. Here, our focus will be on the women’s and the LGBT (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender)-movement, and papers will scrutinize the extent to which predominant notions of families and living arrangements were transformed, and how that modified the overall allocation of resources and their availability. Third, in concentrating on gender and sexuality as categories, we will depict how different historical actors contributed to the transformation of living arrangements and how they influenced the regulation, allocation, and governing of social, cultural, economic, and political resources. Individual papers will focus on parents, youth, and socio-political institutions as actor groups.

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